New Art

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  Dancing for Yourself

  Posted: 2-May-2013, 6:26pm EDT by vvoi

  
  
  Awesome, isn't it?
  Dancing for yourself is the best, and we all (?) know the feeling of something that is so good it should really be changing the world. Sometimes, we take things just a notch further, and include our private rituals in the non-private world, as if testing what the world can handle. But this esthetic extension is usually our little secret. We sometimes share its secret powers with a select group (maybe grafitti, but also psycho-geography, flash mobs, or even sharing a smile with a stranger who caught us laughing to ourselves...).
  Here we have the secret revealed. Dance does change the world. Nothing is ever going to be the same. Say hello to a different persona, space, movement, sound, life.
  
  Now that we've gotten this far, you need to know something: this event was staged. The person dancing is a performer, and what you have just seen is an art project.
  This information changes the experience of watching the video (or in this case, it actually changes the experience of having watched it!). So here is someone who was acting as if they were putting their private ritual spontaneously out in the open. Someone who was building a universe for us to see and interpret. Preparing our experience. Possibly - preparing exactly what we felt before we learned this was a set-up.
  This knowledge seems to be making it more difficult to fully enjoy the event. After all, what a staging implies we know all too well, and though charming it may be...
  
  
  
   ...it feels like keeping a safety net, a secure distance.
  
  Finally, the last step: Let's assume that possibly, this first video was, after all, a genuine, spontaneous dance. There is no final answer. The evidence is not convincing, either side. Once we're in the world of such uncertainties, how does it feel to watch the spectacle?
  --
  The work is not about excluding Gene Kelly. Or the prepared-choreography-space. It's about including the lady from the bus stop (let's say she is an anonymous passer-by). The work is to have Gene face the challenge and acknowledge the other dancer. The one that seems to be her or his own spectator, that remains their own private dancer, and that keeps making our day.
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  Happy Acts

  Posted: 1-April-2013, 6:28pm EDT by vvoi

  In his classic How To Act With Words, J.L.Austin effectively brought about the idea that words (and by extension - other symbolic actions) can change things in the world - they are "performative". In his analysis, he used several categories of his own design. 
  

  Claiming they cannot be considered true or false, Austin proposes to divide speech acts into happy and unhappy ones (the terms seem to have been later substituted (?) by effective, successful or fortunate). The happy ones would be those which achieve the goal of changing reality. The unhappy ones - those which, although they have been constructed correctly, did not achieve this goal (e.g. someone promises something but does not intend to keep his promise).

  Austin could have named his categories Alfa and Beta. Instead, he gave them emotionally charged descriptions. As in: insanely charged. You could say this is just British pragmatism, which has a thing for being playful. But this is a text about the performativity of words. A far-going analysis of the effectiveness of language. Why would the term happy appear in such a context? Is Austin making fun of us, engaging us in value judgements, which, being the decent participants of performativity we are, won't be able to leave? Maybe he implies that even the description of communication requires emotion and engagement. Conventions couldn't possibly be innocent. Accepting them is always burning hot, irrational, un-conscious.
  One other thing - calling an act happy is anthropomorphizing it. More precisely - it is claiming that acts have an agency. 
  You know, when artists talk about works as if they were people: What does the work need? What does it ask of me? 

  Even when we act alone, the act - also the artistic act - doesn't allow for solitude. The more of an act it becomes (does every action get to be an act?), the more it challenges us, burdening us with its agency.
  

  And if we want it to perform, it better be happy.

  
  

  

  Clemens Behr  Revisited Series

   (via)
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  Really real

  Posted: 5-October-2012, 8:13am EDT by vvoi

  Writing about performances one has seen is like telling stories of travels - it is not about a shared experience, all we can do is create a new experience. The experience of "I heard about a show where...". This is not always easy to accept, on either side.

  
  
  The last edition of the Warszawa Centralna festival ended by two shows that deal with the dead-end of civilization as we know it, the fall of paradigms and the attempts to overcome entropy.
  Two shows - one is Christoph Marthaler's +-0, the other, Christoph Schlingesief's Via Intoleranza II, ridiculed our attempts to try and do something, and both of them tried doing something, while not managing, but trying, and maybe doing, but not really, but really...
  Marthaler's is a beautiful and desperate lamentation after a culture which cannot go beyond itself, which fits nowhere and makes nothing. It still is godly, but useless... For all its beauty, I found it proving its point too well - this high culture does nothing, here. It is a mixture of a deep-rooted feeling of superiority and of despair when this superiority does not help, build or bind. It is a hopelessness I am not ready to accept - or contemplate.
  Schlingesief's work (not just this piece) is all about refusing to accept this status quo.
  What does Via Intoleranza II do? If you see the trailer, you might get the impression that it's a lively multi-culti show with quantities of fairly classic stage-action and a humanist message. Which, of course, it refuses to be. And which it is, after all.
  
  
  Let's begin with this: when watching the show, I can't stop imagining Schlingesief-the-director tired of the absolute spectacle with no performative transferrence. Tired of the isolation of art, and, on the other hand, of the happy solutions that are neither happy nor solutions.
  And, of course, tired of being sick, of having his sickness define what and who he is (Schlingensief died of cancer short after the premiere).
  So he makes one last show. A show where stage is a constant reminder that there is a reality outside. An uncomfortable reminder, one which is to make us feel how ridiculous this place, here, is, and that its one hope is making us feel the need to use it for something very different, really real, really real.
  The problem is - unless you leave your culture of distance, pathos and irony, it contaminates everything. But how would you leave this culture? And what tools would you have left?
  Please let me out.
  How do I get out.
  I would love to get out, but can I keep some of the toys? Can I still make it a performance? Can I tell them what I really think, and still keep it a show, and make it unbearable for them to the extent where they themselves will want to leave and act?
  
  Of course, the tools are the tools at hand. The show tools. The contemporary theater tools. The German critical art tools. With a little help from this or that culture or art. It is difficult not to see the presence of the different artistic styles (from traditional Burkinabe music and dance to French-language hip-hop) as a postmodern collage. A playful fairy-tale.
  But the question is not: whether, or how, can the real be built on fiction. The question is: what sort of real can we build with fiction?
  But first: what sort of fiction can we build with the fiction of being smarter-than-all-this and more-provocative-than-all-this?
  Well, in the case of Via Intoleranza II, fiction starts off by looking ridiculous.
  Not again - the happy bourgeois laughing at their own pitiful culture. Not again - the spectators suffering joyfully, as it will all be gone soon, so what do I care, if this is real or not.
  
  The first reaction is frustration: I didn't give you my trust and allow you to leave the space (mental space) of theater, so you can come back into theater and make the same sarcastic, self-flagelating stage jokes I know from so many  other contemporary theater artists.
  Why are you doing this to me. Why are you taking us back into easy bitterness, when your bitterness was difficult and wild, when it was unbearable and over-the-top crazy and it was doing things. Why are you making it seem like it's just a show, after all?
  The difference, here, happens, when you know it's real. If you know that there is an actual opera/school being built in Burkina Faso, if you know Schlingensief really was sick and did die, and really did give his social projects everything he had. Finally, if you know these people have something in there - that something is at stake, then it becomes something else.
  It's a paradoxical situation: the show can only be performative (which is its explicit aim) if you know it corresponds to something real (in the outside world) already.
  Whatever comes out of it, needs us to be prepared, and in a way, needs us to have lived it already. Is this a failure of art-as-intervention?
  Maybe. Or maybe we misjudge theater. We still wishfully dream of the play making the King confess his crimes, out of nothing, out of thin air, and making the anonymous spectator become actor, agent, become activist, become action, become real.
  This may make for some shallow theatrical provocations. Doesn't the spectator know he is more real than the stage? Because he comes from the outside? What is real, in this show, has already happened, and not onstage. It is the outside world that is working. And I'm not sure if the stage helps its existence in any way, if it provides it with the fictional energy, or if it is just an excuse.
  
  After all, what we see is not what we get. We get everything it is part of. We are free to dive in and out of it, using it as a ficitonal or real weapon of our choice. Too abstract? Let's make it concrete then: the crazy stories about the opera being built exist also once you leave the space. You can help build the place. The child actor pretending to be an adult, is actually an adult actor who has the health condition of physically looking like a child. He says it, but why would we believe him? Because we know it already. Or we suspect it, knowing how the layers of fiction and reality abuse each other constantly.
  Which makes it an insider's theater. Moving for those who had been moved even before, out there.
  And extremely frustrating, because it makes it safe, after all, to treat this as a trick, a big, truth-filled trick. No matter how many operas you build and how sad the real death is, they remain outside. The show is so precisely full of itself, it is so spectacle-like, that I'm okay. Just when I hoped I wouldn't be.
  That's my problem? I'm afraid Schlingensief's heritage makes it clear - it's ours.
  
  
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  An Imprecise Silence (4'33")

  Posted: 25-August-2012, 11:09pm EDT by vvoi

  
  
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  Linger A Little Longer

  Posted: 21-August-2012, 2:33pm EDT by vvoi

  
  

  
  A trace is not permanent. It is only there long enough for you to start thinking of it as a thing.
  
  

  

  
  

  Jay Watson's furniture set, called Linger a Little Longer, does just that. It keeps your heat, so you know you have left something, and  you know it won't last.

  
  

  

  

  
  And after a while... well, you know...
  

   

  

  
  

  
  

  (via)
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  About What I Heard About The World

  Posted: 19-August-2012, 1:58pm EDT by vvoi

  "What I Heard About The World" is a theatre performance and an installation, both devised by the joined forces of Third Angel and Mala Voadora.
  This text is about the performance. You can actually see it streaming live two hours from when I'm writing these words, at 4.30PM GMT on this pretty site. (If you're in Edinburgh right now, today is your last chance to see it live at St.Stephen's).
  If you've missed it, there is a good review here which describes it quite well. (Total spoiler). I won't. Once you've seen it/read it...
  
  Here is a trip outside of the comfortable framework of a finished universe. Sure, we've heard some of the stories before. Like the donkey in the Gaza zoo which is painted in stripes so it looks like a zebra. (okay, should have had a spoiler alert there).We might know some even crazier anecdotes. But we have some sort of control of them. Actually, a big part of what these last years have been evolving towards is a better control over what we see of the world. Does Facebook really open up our horizons? Or does it narrow down our spectrum to the channels we know? Sure, something can go viral. But most things don't. They remain little bits of the world, completely alien to us, and paradoxically enough, they seem more inaccessible to us then ever. They are not on the customized map. Ergo, they don't exist. The whole process of customizing our experience, which may seem to be enriching it, is making it easier to cope with the excess of information, with a world that is too vast and too diverse - turning it into something we can feel close to.
  
  Well, this, here, is going back to the outrageous presence of everything that is not me.
  The title is quite revealing: What I Heard About the World.
  I didn't read about it.
  I didn't see it as a Facebook status or Twitter link.
  I heard it.
  Hear-say. One person says something to another person. Remember that? That old analogic thinking? Analogic, as in: palpable. Analogic, as in: coming from analogies, attempts at comparisons. Try to compare what is happening somewhere else on the planet to what is happening to you. Go for the analogy. The donkey in the Gaza zoo represents... How does it compare to anything? What sort of analogy can you make of it? How does your mind cope with difference?
  
  What the performance brings us, is chaos. A world which is not as we would expect. Not as comfortable, easy to empathize with - or easy to judge. It really is a world beyond our comprehension, and that leaves me thinking - how much of my worldview is just about making it easy on myself?
  What makes it so poignant is that it's a live performance. These people, there, represent other people. They are unavoidable, they will not disappear, they will not stop shooting until they've finished all the red paint. The liveness means each of these stories becomes a real thing once again. A different thing, a represented thing, but once again - palpable. It gains a human scale. A scale not quite as comfortable as a status update. Not quite as easy to digest. But, in this case, much more fun.
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  Leave the Work Alone

  Posted: 8-January-2012, 6:22am EST by vvoi

  
  Let's set the background.
  
  
  Andre Lepecki:
  

  What dramaturgy as practice proposes is the discovery that it is the work itself that has its own sovereign, performative desires, wishes, and commands. It is the work that owns its own authorial force.

  
  This seemingly fairy-tale description of creation was once made clear for me by Alexander Kelly. Whenever working on a piece, there is always a point where the question that takes over the process is: What does the work want?
  
  But here's another question: Why? Why is it the work's work?
  After all, beyond a question of "ethics" (Lepecki uses the term), it is hard to justify why something being made by an artist should not obey the artist's ideas, needs and desires.
  
  

  

  
  The most superficial answer is, because it works. A work needs coherence, as in, it needs to be a work to be a work, and the focus on the work's identity allows to be more effective and less prone to the artist's varying ideas, humor and temper. If the work wants it, there is little you can do but obey it. Consequently, you will think twice before introducing a foreign element. The piece needs to fit in the piece, not you.
  
  Which brings us to another level. The work, here, becomes master. This means the artist is working for "someone else", and his burden is smaller. "Don't blame me - blame the work".
  
  But also, this means the artist does not really "create". He "executes". Which is a comfortable movement towards the neo-platonian idealism we know best from Michelangelo. There is something, an idea, hidden in that matter (be it solid matter, movement or words), and the task is only to dig into it.
  
  The above creates an important advantage for the worker: he can suspend his disbelief. For the duration of the work, he can be a believer, no matter how much doubt he has in regards to his own work. He is now free to move in whatever direction is necessary to deliver this being. And once delivered, he can complain. He can even complain while delivering it. But this, here, is the job, and one has to do whatever it takes to complete it.
  
  All this is very nice, but most of the time, the work sucks. Most of the time, even those who claim to do the work's work make an impressive quantity of uninteresting, though certainly in a way uncompromising projects.
  How do we deal with it?
  Or, to put it more bluntly, who's to blame?
  If in the beginning, "no one (except for the piece itself in its atemporal consistency) knows what it will be", than how are we to analyze its failure? Where are we to look for its sources?
  
  

  

  
  Then there is the other scary option: the work doesn't suck. It works. Only it says something else than I do. The dream dreams another dream - which is not mine. How dare it! How dare it speak in my stead! How dare it take my moral will into the immoral pit hole, or the other way around, turning my cynical irony into a moralist's sword? How dare it ignore all the work I've put into being who I am? I do not want this thing which is not mine. I want it somewhere else, let it grow somewhere else, let the cancer move to another soul, I am cured, I tell you, I am at peace and no pro-ject can take that away from me. Consider me to be the PR manager for the daimonion, I might do what it pleases, but I am somewhere else, you will not find me here, the artist cries. I have worked hard to sell my soul, now please, do not let it keep on being mine.
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  After Fishing

  Posted: 7-December-2011, 3:25pm EST by vvoi

  

  
  "Last will and Testament" by Mariusz Hermanowicz (with Zygmunt Hermanowicz) was an instant crush for me.
  
  After his father's death, Mariusz Hermanowicz discovers, among the things the father left, boxes filled with fishing lures of his father's own design. Some of the lures are finished, many seem more like prototypes, projects. There are also drawings, parts, materials. A universe of lures.
  The father, you see, loved fishing. But he was never satisfied with the lures he had. He kept saying how he would make some of his own, which would allow him to catch many more fish. And kept picking things up from the ground, saying they would be perfect for the lure. "But I had never heard that he ever started doing anything from the things he found".
  So what are these objects? Have they ever been used? Were they supposed to be used?
  "Did he ever try to catch fish with them? Would any fish get caught on them?"
  
  I am in love with this project.
  Need I say more?
  Would you like me to rationalize love?
  (Of course, if you are reading any of this, it is because, like readers of poetry, you believe words go far beyond any silly logos-stories.)
  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  Here are my quasireasons, then:
  I love that violence can turn into passion which can turn into art.
  
  

  

  
  The ideal sublimation.
  The utopic idea that someone can move from aggression to beauty.
  
  

  

  
  The uncertain heritage. The ambiguity of what remains.
  
  

  

  
  
  I guess, it is also the ambiguity of what is already there, of what we do, of our own motivations.
  
  

  

  
  The bait transforms into the fish.
  
  

  

  
  The challenge of seducing the fish becomes the fish's seduction.
  The man identifies with the fish to the extent that these little pieces of metal, plastic and wood become a representation of fish, or more, like African masks, they are now a reality of their own, with their peculiar morphology and purposeful abstraction.
  
  Yet there is nothing pragmatic about this purpose. There is madness in this reason.
  
  It is a mad inner dialogue with a fish that will never be caught. The fish that blissfuly remains the being-to-correspond. Transforming these carefuly selected pieces of material into the lure that caught me.
  
  

  

  

  

  (Be sure to see the entire gallery - the series develops at a great pace.)
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  Looking at the robots, I think

  Posted: 24-November-2011, 3:08am EST by vvoi

  
  David Lewandowski, going to the store
  
  
  
  Robot maker Azusa Amino recently won the Robot Japan 2 Dance competition with his 23-centimeter-high Toko Toko Maru robot. 
  
  
  - they are the un-ego, the dream of letting go of the source. They are a life whose source is the non-live, whose origin is not identical, so a different, non-human causality comes into place. The source, here, is the source-code. And that makes all the difference. Saying it is matter brought to life explains nothing. Think, rather, of metamorphosis, of alchemy, of things becoming not-themselves. (Of us becoming not-ourselves). The robot is not a robot if it remains the sum of its parts. It is a robot when it does something it is not supposed to do - when we see it as inhabiting itself. (It - who?, we ask, excitedly). They are our hope for the unexpected: if we can control everything, and the result is somethig more than what we were making, then there is no everything.
  And we can dream on.
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  The House

  Posted: 5-November-2011, 3:23am EDT by vvoi

  
  

  This house which is almost gone. Which still has the lines and weight of a house, yet could very well be called landscape. This house which is a set of floors engraved with memories that no one you know could ever read. Things, as people, come and go, yet we believe them to be different, we invest what is left of our faith in this space or that. It's what you think as you move the objects around, pretty damn self-conscious, pretty certain that this armchair in this place is pure iconoclasm. 

  
  

  You'd rather it were a farm. You would prefer it to be pragmatic, and you would strive for it to be pure function, eliminating any sentiment, oiling the squeaking doors so the sound doesn't leave traces, cleaning the floor so there are no signatures. No time travels. 

  
  

  Then you picture this farm, and somehow it's not so proper, the weather is muddy, or maybe that's the way it always looks, there are traces everywhere, things have a rhythm they will never ever retain, things have a rhythm they will never ever give up. It is your wildest dream, and this land is full of you, it does not allow you to leave. You seem to have been here long before you've ever pictured this place.

  
  

  You move back, trying not to stare, so as not to keep any of this. Then you see the roof, its perfectly symmetrical form (it is not symmetric, but that is how you see it), its blissful abstraction. The way this alien form remains here. Now, yes, you can leave. You exit the picture, you go back to the house where the armchair is elsewhere, you walk out through the garden, and you take your hard-earned sight to another nest.

  Nicholas McLeod, The Farm (2010)